FSFE Newsletter - July 2013

In Court: Defending our Freedoms with Copyleft

"To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying
you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have
certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you
modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of
others." (Praemble of the GNU GPL)

Unfortunately sometimes companies forget their responsibility when using
Free Software in their products. Someone has to make sure that
companies are reminded from time to time. That's what we do with our compliance work. After
our volunteers found a GNU GPL violation in a workshop in May 2012, we handed
all the evidence to Harald Welte from gpl-violations.org and his lawyers. They
processed the case and we were now
informed that we won the case.

EU's public bodies wasting 1.1 billion Euro every year

This month the European Commission published a Communication titled
"Against lock-in" (see FSFE's
comments.) The European Commission urges public bodies to break free from
vendor lock-in in their IT systems by relying on standards rather than brand
names and proprietary technology. Besides the Communication highlights that
public bodies unnecessarily spend 1.1 billion Euro every year because they do
not allow more competition among their suppliers. The Commission cites studies
saying that 16% of public procurement make reference to brand names. In most
of the cases those brand names are the names of non-free software
companies.

Implementing Open Standard policies is hard work but is necessary to ensure
that Free Software companies can compete on an equal basis. We criticised the EC before and will
continue to remind them that Open Standard policies only have value if they are
really implemented.

NSA: 24 hours video surveillance with Xbox One?

Faced with user protests, Microsoft has been forced to make the terms for
its latest Xbox gaming console look a little less restrictive. However, the
“new” terms which had caused such outrage were not in fact new at all: they
were similar to most other proprietary software licences, including those
covering other Microsoft software products and on-line services. Anna Morris created a graphic about
it.

Also on surveillance: twelve years ago the European Parliament called upon
the Commission and public bodies across Europe to help citizens and companies
protect themselves from surveillance. Free Software played a crucial part
there. Unfortunately the
EC did not implement them.

After the leaks from intelligence services, some of your friends might now
understand much better what you talked about when you explained them why you do
not use Skype, Facebook, Xbox One, or others. They might now understand why it
is important to be in
control of your device and your data. Erik Albers wrote
an article about ownership, remote control and privacy, and in connection
with Xbox One ask how many people would visit a home when there would be a
sticker saying “This flat is under 24h surveillance by Microsoft and the
NSA”.

Founder of GNU and the president of the Free Software Foundation,
Richard Stallman was inducted into the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame! His
comment: "Now that we have made the Internet work, the next task is to stop it
from being a platform for massive surveillance, and make it work in a way
that respects human rights, including privacy."

Our intern Lucile reports
that on June 25 the French Senate voted the final version of the law on
education, accepting a governmental amendment weakening the bill's Free
Software provision. Following April's call for action (FR), she spent a morning calling and writing emails from the FSFE office to members of
this commission. Beside, she looked at what
other Free Software news we had in France during June.

Mobile web users already number 1.5 billion, which happens
to be quite close to the total number of Internet users back in 2009. Read
Henri Bergius' articlethe
mobile-first web.

His article "Where Now
for the Free Software Desktop?" takes us on a journey of GNU/Linux on
the desktop. Paul concludes that "once we have shown that we can work
together and act on all of [the mentioned challenges] simultaneously and
continuously as a community, maybe then it will become clear that the year
of the Linux desktop has at last arrived for good."

Get active: Post us Good Free Software News

Often the news we spread contain negative developments, topics where we need
attention to fix a problem. Fellow Chris "cw" wants to pay more attention to
the good news about Free Software. The idea is to publish good news on a dedicated wiki page.